Aroom: Sky Heist

Aroom and Locked Room are different venues that are part of the same company and a single website, but Aroom is the one that tends to get the more favourable reviews. I’ve only previously played their zombie theme Deadland, but enjoyed it enough to make trying the venue’s latest room a priority.

With a setting somewhere between steampunk and the Gilded Age, in this game you’re sneaking into a zeppelin to steal the prize jewels of a wealthy maharaja. An initially small area soon opens up, and then some more. I’d describe the decor as more polished than showy, in keeping with the high-class setting, and it successfully creates the illusion that the area you can access is part of a larger whole.

Although the storyline is straightforward (find the jewels and get away), what we were doing felt like a meaningful part of a coherent narrative, and broadly speaking the puzzles supported that narrative too.

Depending how purist you want to be, and how strict you are about what can be excused in a steampunk setting, there are some electronics and other elements that seem a little anachronistic, but I was too busy having a good time to be bothered by that.

For me it flowed very smoothly; the only points where we stopped making progress were when we’d missed something, or put in a jigsaw piece upside down (oops, sorry). Without there being particular stand-out wow moments (though the set is certainly impressive), it was just a very cohesive and well-designed game, amongst the strongest of what’s available in Budapest.